


Acquaintance Renewed

by cornheck



Series: The Long Way from Metuchen [1]
Category: Be More Chill - Ned Vizinni
Genre: M/M, they left high school and now they're in college
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-31
Updated: 2018-12-31
Packaged: 2019-10-01 17:04:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,026
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17248067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cornheck/pseuds/cornheck
Summary: Familiarity is a comfort Jeremy Heere feels little of as he starts college away from home, but he finds it in Jake Dillinger. Being the only ones of their Middleborough class on campus, they have the opportunity to meet each other all over again—this time, without the judgements of their former peers.





	Acquaintance Renewed

**Author's Note:**

> like all of my bmc fics, this also takes place in the book's universe and there will be future references to characters that only appear in the novel as well as craig and noel from _it's kind of a funny story_ , meaning the squip was never evil, michael's a slut for weezer, jake wasn't as much of a tool, and most importantly the beanie babies are canon. nsfw will appear in later parts, so be patient (and pay attention to the tags/warnings if you're an underage reader).
> 
> don't interact with this fic if you're a hamilton fan. i don't care if you liked the fic or not, your opinions are irrelevant to me, so take your slaveowner-loving ass somewhere else, bye

There’s a nagging in the back of Jeremy’s mind that won’t shut up, and it hasn’t shut up since he came to terms with attending a different college than Michael halfway through senior year. He felt the same nausea he used to feel in middle school every time he and his best friend had to be apart for more than a day, and at this point he was beginning to think this would be his life for the next four years; maneuvering his bachelor’s program without friends. A friendless college existence seemed like such an anomaly, and standing at the back of the Brower center cafeteria, Jeremy felt as if his assumptions were confirmed.

This weekend marked the first Friday since orientation, and he’d spent almost all of the past week entirely alone with the exception of his equally timid roommate. Sipping ginger ale pathetically from Dixie cup, he watched his peers wildly enjoy themselves at the expense of the student union. He can’t help but think, over and over, that this is definitely a college mixer. Grinding is the norm, and there’s really no such thing as a chaperone when it comes to events like this, practically a university-sponsored party.

Frat boys and their newly-inducted sorority counterparts all danced limply amongst each other like they were some kind of pulsing mass or a colony of fungi. _Cool people are still just like termites,_ he sighs and opts to finish off the rest of his drink, downing the flat ginger ale in one swig. When the bottom of the paper cup no longer obstructs his vision, the half-swallowed remainder of his soda almost comes right back up through his nose. There’s someone standing in front of him, a guy by the looks of it. The sudden presence having startled him, it takes him an embarrassing few moments to recover, trying to conceal his choking hacks as he swallows the spit-warmed pop with a friendly nod.

“Hey,” the figure before him speaks, his face shadowed by the darkness that dominated the back end of the ballroom—made worse by the lights behind him.

Jeremy straightens his back, hand crumpling the spent Dixie cup as he coughs twice, hard. Nodding his head again with a forced smile in the stead of a verbal reply. His eyes were starting to water.

“You okay?” he speaks again, this time with a note of familiarity.

Jeremy squints, still clearing his throat, “Yeah, m’fine,” he rasps. He can feel the ginger drink burning in the back of his nostrils and he has to hold back a burgeoning grimace at the sensation.

“Hey, re’you Jeremy Heere?” while he can’t see his face for shit, he swears he can hear a smile as he talks, and the moment he hears his name, it clicks in his mind who he’s talking to; the same tone, the same cyborg niceness, the same gait. This was Jake Dillinger.

The ginger ale still stings in his lungs, despite his frantic gulping to coax it down, “Yeah, that’s me,” his basic instincts tell him to treat this like some kind of job interview and act like a refined, professional stranger.

Jake gives a tilt of his head and a faint nod of his own in response, “I thought it was you, the lights are kinda dim,” he chuckles briefly, assuring himself. “It’s nice to see a friendly face.” Friendly. That was a new one.

His words sure felt real, but that had always been the thing about Jake, you had to wonder if he were being authentic or playing you to get… _something_ he wanted. What he could possibly want with him—the gangly-limbed loser from high school—was a mystery, however.

“Yeah, I guess,” Jeremy gulps, pressing his lips into another neutral grimace. _That’s not what you say to something like that,_ he scolds himself, peering down at the shadowed ballroom carpet and rolling his eyes behind closed lids as he pretended to regain his bearings.

“You’re the only person I’ve seen here from Middleborough,” Jake remarks with a very trademark, casual tone. “Pretty much everyone else is at Rutgers, Pace, n’ NYU,” he leans against Jeremy’s section of the south wall, putting his weight on his shoulder and side, still mostly facing him, doing his best to look engaged, it would seem.

Jake was still here trying to initiate a conversation with him, and yet the party seemed far from over. By Jeremy’s observations, this seemed more like ‘halftime’, when the faculty in attendance all start to get tired and wander off, leaving anyone to tamper with the contents of the lemonade and punch. That was usually the climax of any happening event, when people started getting drunk off jungle juice and spiked drinks. He probably looked pitiful standing over here, avoiding human contact like the loser he was so accustomed to being, and the thought occurs to him that this is probably some manner of ruse. _Jake’s putting up some kind of act to look charitable… or something, that’s gotta be it._

“Y-Yeah, same,” Jeremy still clutches the partially-crumpled paper cup, delicately in his fingers, as if he didn’t especially want to damage it any further than he already had. His free arm shifts to cradle his elbow and he only briefly glances to his side to make eye contact with Jake before defaulting back to spectate the mess of a crowd that continued to clamor over the unsupervised music. There wasn’t a DJ, just a pre-set tracklist of remixed pop garbage, thrown together in the hopes of appeasing the rowdy freshman class.

Jake still hasn’t relented, but began to ‘back off’, taking a cue from Jeremy’s anxious arm-hugging and resting his back against the wall, mirroring Jeremy’s predictably antisocial stance, his shoulders flesh with the textured wallpaper. “Not to assume, but it kinda seems like you don’t wanna be here,” the jock chides, maintaining his grin.

That reeled his attention back in. Now he could only assume he’d somehow offended Jake, looking meekly to his side to give him the dignity of a more forward reply, “Oh… well, I… kinda don’t,” Jeremy tongues the roof of his mouth, keeping his fidgeting to a minimum while he’s staring at the other.

Jake offers what looks like an understanding nod, but his eyes narrow with a hint of confusion, “So… why’re you here?” It’s clear his tone emerges far more off-putting than he intends, his eyes widening slightly as he tries to backpedal. “Sorry, I mean… you could be anywhere, why’d you… come to the mixer?”

Jeremy shrugs, and by his count he shrugs for two seconds too long, “My roommate seemed like he wanted to be alone… and I slept in too long n’ missed dinner at the dining hall. There’s food here, and I don’t have any lying around so… I wanted to come,” he gestures to the empty, grease-stained pizza boxes on the other side of their wall, stacked on the rim of a ridiculously short recycling bin that couldn’t fit any of the refuse adequately.

“You ‘slept in’?” Jake seems almost impressed, chin retracting in a display of surprise before he tilted his head again and his brows lift with curiosity. “That’s, like all day.”

The sight of his bewilderment makes Jeremy laugh, and for a moment he cracks a legitimate smile. “N-No, no, I… uh, fell asleep after class, it was past eight when I woke up,” he finds an odd sense of comfort in walking through his start-of-weekend routine; in which he prepped himself for two days of reading in bed and only emerged from his dorm to shower or take the infrequent bathroom break.

“So, you nap after class,” the retort from Jake comes knowingly with a smirk.

“Yeah,” he stands  a bit farther from the wall, sheepishly gaining some interest. A sick feeling lingered in his gut as he entertained the concept this—this entire play-it-nice conversation—could all be a grand setup for his humiliation. Pondering the notion, of being utterly mortified with a hefty chunk of his peers present, alone made him incapable of looking too enthusiastic, yet a part of him remained uncharacteristically optimistic.

“I haven’t spotted you in any of mine… yet, at least. I think. What’re you taking?,” when Jake carries on talking, Jeremy notes that he still looks as thoroughly inviting and sickeningly _nice_ as he had when he first approached. His lips are curled, sweetly beaming, and his eyes seem to cue him for a response.

“Just… basic gen-eds,” he tries a casual non-answer before Jake’s subtle nodding and a lack of reply tells him he’s probing for an actual list. “Rhetoric, calc, sociology, I’m also in this anthropology lecture… there’s some others, but honestly they’re just… basics, y’know?”  

“Hm,” he nods. “I had to do a lot of that when I was a senior so I’d be able to start actually, like, _doing_ stuff when I enrolled. I’m pretty dead-set on my major,” Jake looks rightfully proud of himself. His ego must’ve been starved for a good stroke.

“What are you studying?” Jeremy asks with intrigue. Not paying attention throughout four years of high school had its perks, like being able to ask such a question without having to pretend to be captivated by the prospect of an answer.

In high school, and even still, Jeremy hadn’t the slightest iota of what he’d actually be studying, himself. The fact that Jake seemed to know what he wanted to do with his life was fascinating to say the least. Clearly Jake had a much more interesting high school career than he had. They didn’t know each other then, but it sure seemed like it was worth the effort to know each other now.

“Physical therapy,” he doesn’t miss a beat, and he still looks just as prideful. “Med school, basically. I wanna do sports medicine, but I’m told it might change depending on how I feel about residency later on.”

“Oh-huh,” as he nods, Jeremy can feel an unconscious lean to his stance. “Wow, yeah, that’s… Isn’t that… more than four years?” 

“I started kinda early, I took some stuff senior year to bump up my credits,” he explains. “The basic stuff, as you put it.” 

“No kidding,” scoffing to himself at his own lack of initiative, Jeremy pushes down his urge to self-deprecate. He was actually _happy_ for Jake. A year ago, he was still recovering from third degree burns, now he was… a guy who actually had plans for his life. Not that he didn’t before the party, but it certainly triumphed over Jeremy’s undeclared status. “It’s… really good that you know what you’re doing… or what you wanna do,” he croaks, swallowing back a pool of ginger-flavored spit. 

“Do you… not?” he asks with his signature head-tilt, like some confused, athletic dog. “I mean, that’s honestly fine, if you don’t. I only know ‘cause I don’t really want to be here for longer than I have to,” Jake adds with a _true_ laugh—not faked, like all the nervous chuckles that Jeremy’s been forcing out—to ease the pressure of his question.  

The urge to blurt out, _‘I’m a product of failure drifting through life and I’ll probably just settle for a liberal arts degree’_ subsides as he grits his teeth. “No, I just… have a lot to consider, I guess. I don’t really know,” he answers quietly, hoping that his words will be lost in the background of the music and party chatter, hoping Jake will merely give a phony nod and let the question die.  

Bue he doesn’t. Squinting and leaning his head forward into Jeremy’s orbit of personal space, he’s really straining to hear him. 

“Hey, d’you wanna step out for a bit? It’s kinda loud in here,” talking over the noise pollution, he quirks a smile, showcasing two rows of straight teeth. “You, uh, didn’t want to be here, anyway,” Jake harkens back to his confession with a coercing grin. 

“...Sure, okay,” there’s a clear hesitance in the way Jeremy carries his voice, following Jake like a marionette as he takes the few slow steps over toward the back door, like their shadows are tied together. 

He still finds the scattered free will enough to discard his wrinkled, paper cup atop the pile of grease-stained pizza boxes. It doesn’t stay where he wants it to, toppling to the side and land amongst the emptied two-liters that sat to either side of the bin. 

 _Jake hasn’t gotten the memo that chivalry’s dead,_ he thinks, watching his step while the other holds the metal push-bar door in the threshold to let him step outside.  

It’s almost September but the air is still humid. It hasn’t shaken its August stickiness, but it’s still nicer than the stuffy, converted ballroom, like the carpets and rafters absorbed dancers’ fleeting body heat to insulate the place. 

“I… couldn’t hear you too well, but I thought you said you’re, uh, undecided…?” Jake prods him for clarity, the door shutting behind the pair of them with a loud click. Loud music from inside instantly muffles, growing distant as they walk away. Now that they’re out in the open night, facing the lantern-lined quad, the indistinct pop lyrics are drowned out by the sound of chirping crickets. 

Jeremy, nodding in response, offers Jake another quasi-smile, nervous and forced. They’d been talking just between each other for the past several minutes and the anxiousness hadn’t subsided, as he’d hoped it would’ve, but intensified. Before, they were witness to a whole crowd of people, it didn’t matter that they weren’t interacting with anyone else, it was enough of a comfort to be able to blend into the background and spectate for the purpose of distraction. Now it was just he and Jake on an empty campus after ten. 

“It’s fine, you’ll figure it out,” he waves a hand, though it wasn’t his burden of a decision to shrug off. “ Nothing’s wrong with that.”

“Yeah, I just get… stressed about it. It’s not that I don’t know that… that it’s okay, it’s just,” he pauses, hands finding their way into his pockets to still them and ground himself. “Sometimes I just get nervous about things and there’s no reason why, it’s just… that way. If… that makes sense.”

“Like… anxiety?” He asks. Jeremy spies the shadow of a nod in the corner of his eye, gradually taking steps out toward the courtyard as Jake took the lead, striding away from the Reeve building’s double doors. “Yeah, it makes sense, don’t worry.”

“Oh,” he shares a more genuine smile. Though his nerves haven’t calmed, Jeremy’s heart rate has, and the subtle breeze cools his skin. He never thought he’d be more grateful to leave a party he was invited to for a change. Then again, school functions always sucked. Being in college didn’t change that one bit.

“Do you live on campus, then?” Jake asks, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his shorts.

“I don’t, actually,” he starts, swallowing to dampen the dry sting in his throat. Choking on Ginger Ale did a number on his airway. “It was cheaper to get an apartment and commute on the bus. I have a roommate, and his girlfriend helps with groceries, too.”

“Damn,” he interjects, almost sounding impressed. “You live very far from campus then?”

“No, I… well, I guess it is, my apartment’s across from Moody Park, so I don’t… wanna walk that much every day,” Jeremy laughs. “What about you? D’you live on-campus?”

“Yeah,” he answers. “I want to try and be an RA next year. Plus, I don’t really have the money for rent without a job. Oh, and no groceries,” Jake smiles. “You… want me to walk you to your bus stop?”

Jeremy halts, “Oh… uh, I mean… aren’t the dorms back that way?” He asks, looking over his shoulder beyond the student center at the dark shape of the residence halls behind them.

“Yeah, but I have to go back to Brower, anyway, and help clean up. You can never be too careful, though, walking around alone at night.”

“Alright, then,” Jeremy agrees. “It’s not too far, I guess.”

The waxing gibbous of a moon shone brightly enough that the parts of the quad outside the reach of the streetlamps’ range were still illuminated by the pale, lunar glow. At a loss for what to say, Jeremy kept time of Jake’s footsteps with his own. He slows his pace to try and synchronize with each foot-fall until Jake finally stops in his tracks. The sidewalk before them diverges at the mouth of the circle drive in front of Trenton Hall, the bus stop across the street just within view. He looks up at Jake.

“Well, I should probably head back,” Jake says, pausing to look around for a moment. “You good from here?”

Jeremy nods. “Yeah, I’m fine,” he answers promptly. “Thanks for walking me out.” Jake smiles, still standing there, and looks at him as if he’s hesitant to turn away.

“No problem,” he replies. “We should actually hang out sometime, you know.”

“Oh,” Jeremy blinks. "Sure."

“Maybe just keep in touch in the meantime,” Jake pulls his phone from his pocket, the smudges on his screen visible in the low light for the split-second before it unlocks. “It’d kinda suck to have to start over completely, you know? It’s cool you go here. I haven’t seen anyone else from Metuchen and I’m pretty sure they’re all staying closer to home for school, so…” He offers his phone to Jeremy, a new contact filled out in his name. “Maybe you could put your number in and I’ll be sure to text you sometime.”

Jeremy takes the phone in his hand and nods, not saying anything in response until after he’s input his number. “Yeah,” he stammered a moment, handing the device back to Jake and stuffing his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “Keep in touch.”

Jake grins, raising a hand without waving it to bid him off, “Yep. Nice to see you around,” he smiles wider, “Have a good night, Jeremy.”

**Author's Note:**

> my tumblr is [here](http://www.cornheck.tumblr.com) and you're free to ask me things about this fic since i think it'll be a while until i update it, like it might literally be months, that's just my pace.
> 
> don't message me if you're a hamilton fan, yall can keep idolizing the nonblack latino man who drops the n word on the radio just because he writes raps for wealthy white people who can afford broadway tickets lmao


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